Episode 292: Boundary Issues

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_00]: Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist, Dave Pizarro, having

[00:00:06] [SPEAKER_00]: an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics.

[00:00:09] [SPEAKER_00]: Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and

[00:00:14] [SPEAKER_00]: knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:19] [SPEAKER_08]: You must have thought it was White Boy Day.

[00:00:23] [SPEAKER_08]: It ain't White Boy Day, is it?

[00:00:25] [SPEAKER_03]: Oh man, it ain't White Boy Day.

[00:00:30] [SPEAKER_03]: The great and us has spoken!

[00:00:35] [SPEAKER_03]: Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

[00:00:57] [SPEAKER_08]: Brains than you have.

[00:01:05] [SPEAKER_07]: Anybody can have a brain.

[00:01:09] [SPEAKER_04]: You're a very bad man.

[00:01:11] [SPEAKER_04]: I'm a very good man.

[00:01:13] [SPEAKER_04]: Just a very bad wizard.

[00:01:16] [SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.

[00:01:19] [SPEAKER_01]: And Dave, Labor Day weekend is here.

[00:01:22] [SPEAKER_01]: The summer of Glenn Powell has come to an end.

[00:01:25] [SPEAKER_01]: I know it's hard to choose just one, but what was your favorite Glenn Powell moment this summer?

[00:01:33] [SPEAKER_01]: I don't...I barely know who Glenn Powell is.

[00:01:36] [SPEAKER_01]: Do you know who he is?

[00:01:37] [SPEAKER_01]: My guess was that like it was 50-50 whether you would know who he is at all.

[00:01:42] [SPEAKER_09]: No, I just Googled him and I know who he is.

[00:01:44] [SPEAKER_09]: Like the actor Glenn Powell?

[00:01:45] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[00:01:46] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, I recognize him.

[00:01:47] [SPEAKER_01]: But no, I didn't.

[00:01:48] [SPEAKER_01]: He was in a lot of movies this summer.

[00:01:51] [SPEAKER_01]: Twisters, the Linklater movie, Hitman.

[00:01:55] [SPEAKER_01]: Everyone was just like critics were just fawning over him.

[00:01:59] [SPEAKER_01]: Everybody loves him.

[00:02:00] [SPEAKER_01]: He's a UT guy, like a Texas guy.

[00:02:03] [SPEAKER_01]: So like, you know, he's very involved with there.

[00:02:06] [SPEAKER_01]: But all that said, like, I don't think he's that good.

[00:02:10] [SPEAKER_01]: Like I saw him in Everybody Wants Some.

[00:02:12] [SPEAKER_01]: I thought he was very funny.

[00:02:13] [SPEAKER_01]: Like, you know, as a side comic character in a Linklater like hangout movie, he was great for that.

[00:02:20] [SPEAKER_01]: But like I saw Hitman.

[00:02:22] [SPEAKER_01]: I saw it in the theater and then with like a remote Q&A afterwards with him and Linklater.

[00:02:28] [SPEAKER_01]: And like I hated his performance.

[00:02:30] [SPEAKER_01]: I thought it sucked.

[00:02:31] [SPEAKER_01]: Like the movie itself was just mediocre, but in large part because his performance was really bad.

[00:02:36] [SPEAKER_01]: And then he was just a dick in the Q&A.

[00:02:39] [SPEAKER_01]: Not a dick, a douche.

[00:02:40] [SPEAKER_01]: So I'm completely mystified why everybody loves him.

[00:02:44] [SPEAKER_09]: I always wonder how much the studio engines do this thing.

[00:02:48] [SPEAKER_09]: Can they stir up like this kind of buzz?

[00:02:51] [SPEAKER_09]: You know, we know that this obviously happened like in the golden age of Hollywood.

[00:02:55] [SPEAKER_09]: Like that's all they did.

[00:02:57] [SPEAKER_09]: But like, are they able to do that now?

[00:02:58] [SPEAKER_01]: They had like rooms where they talk about who they're going to make a star, who she's going to sleep with, who she's smoking men and fedoras, like putting press releases out.

[00:03:08] [SPEAKER_01]: But like it's one thing when you're doing that with like Cary Grant or, you know, Catherine Hepburn or Loretta Lynn or somebody, you know, like it's another thing when it's Glenn Powell.

[00:03:21] [SPEAKER_01]: Like it's just another just degeneration.

[00:03:24] [SPEAKER_01]: Like there are no movie stars, you know, or there are very few movie stars.

[00:03:28] [SPEAKER_01]: And so like they're desperate to have one.

[00:03:31] [SPEAKER_01]: But I don't think he's the guy.

[00:03:33] [SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, that's way too much Glenn Powell talk.

[00:03:35] [SPEAKER_01]: I can't believe people were calling it the Glenn Powell summer.

[00:03:39] [SPEAKER_01]: You know, like Jesus Christ, it was like a lot of things actually relates to the second segment and what we're talking about then.

[00:03:50] [SPEAKER_01]: We are talking about a paper called actually Trixie tore off the first page of called Beyond Newton.

[00:03:58] [SPEAKER_09]: Why assumptions of universality are critical to cognitive science and how to finally move past them?

[00:04:03] [SPEAKER_09]: Yes.

[00:04:03] [SPEAKER_01]: By Crouppen, Davis and Henrik, which I know, obviously, Joe Henrik, former guest on the show, a interviewee and a very bad wizard morality behind the curtain.

[00:04:17] [SPEAKER_01]: Great actually researcher, one of my favorite research is going right now.

[00:04:21] [SPEAKER_01]: But first.

[00:04:24] [SPEAKER_01]: OK, so this was something I put into slack at some point or you did.

[00:04:30] [SPEAKER_01]: I don't even remember what you did.

[00:04:31] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it is called Friend and it is an AI chat box.

[00:04:39] [SPEAKER_01]: I guess it comes as a necklace with a little circle that has a recorder on it.

[00:04:45] [SPEAKER_08]: Yeah.

[00:04:46] [SPEAKER_01]: And I don't know. Does it talk?

[00:04:48] [SPEAKER_01]: I couldn't tell. We're going to go through the video.

[00:04:49] [SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't talk.

[00:04:50] [SPEAKER_01]: But so no.

[00:04:51] [SPEAKER_01]: So that thing just just records a physical reminder that it's there.

[00:04:55] [SPEAKER_01]: But really, it's just yeah, it's like a wire, but a wire that you wear like on the outside.

[00:05:01] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, it's close to parity.

[00:05:03] [SPEAKER_09]: Like it's just not you can't even it doesn't talk.

[00:05:05] [SPEAKER_09]: What it does is it text sends you a message.

[00:05:09] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, exactly.

[00:05:10] [SPEAKER_09]: So OK, first of all, what intrigued you about this?

[00:05:13] [SPEAKER_09]: I assume that you were looking maybe for some friendship somewhere.

[00:05:17] [SPEAKER_01]: I both was looking for it and then I found it with friend.

[00:05:23] [SPEAKER_01]: I like I urge people if they're not driving or, you know, out for a walk to go to friend dot com and they have a nice little two minute video describing what it is.

[00:05:36] [SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's probably best to just go through the video and I don't know introduce it to our listeners.

[00:05:42] [SPEAKER_01]: This isn't a sponsor.

[00:05:43] [SPEAKER_01]: We don't do sponsors anymore.

[00:05:47] [SPEAKER_01]: We are just intrigued.

[00:05:50] [SPEAKER_09]: Let's you and I watch the video.

[00:05:51] [SPEAKER_01]: OK.

[00:05:57] [SPEAKER_08]: I'm so out of breath.

[00:06:01] Made it.

[00:06:06] [SPEAKER_01]: All right, just to set the stage, a young Asian woman taking a hike in nature, quote unquote, quote unquote.

[00:06:17] [SPEAKER_09]: It just looks like set dressing like so badly.

[00:06:19] [SPEAKER_09]: It looks like when you go and you buy like fake plants at the dollar store of like different varieties and you just set them in front of the counter or like a Hitchcock like a person taking a hike in a Hitchcock movie.

[00:06:31] [SPEAKER_01]: You see the young Asian woman talking, saying that she's kind of out of breath, although this does not seem like a difficult hike.

[00:06:40] [SPEAKER_09]: She's wearing the necklace.

[00:06:42] [SPEAKER_09]: First of all, she's like weirdly talking to herself celebrating that she made it to the top of this studio.

[00:06:47] [SPEAKER_01]: There does not seem like there's any incline.

[00:06:51] [SPEAKER_09]: She goes, oh, and then presses the center of her chest where this dangling pendant is.

[00:06:57] [SPEAKER_09]: And she immediately reaches into her purse, pulls out her phone, and there's a text from Amy that says, well, at least you're outside.

[00:07:06] [SPEAKER_01]: She says, that's fair.

[00:07:08] [SPEAKER_01]: And they continue.

[00:07:10] [SPEAKER_04]: All right.

[00:07:11] [SPEAKER_04]: Let me show you how to game, bro.

[00:07:15] [SPEAKER_04]: OK.

[00:07:16] [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, come on.

[00:07:17] [SPEAKER_04]: Come on.

[00:07:18] [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, let's go.

[00:07:19] [SPEAKER_04]: Are you serious?

[00:07:21] [SPEAKER_01]: Come on, man.

[00:07:23] [SPEAKER_01]: I hate this game.

[00:07:26] [SPEAKER_04]: Take notes, baby.

[00:07:28] [SPEAKER_01]: Now we have two, let's say mixed race men, one in a sweater vest.

[00:07:34] [SPEAKER_09]: There's three, but it pans out a little bit.

[00:07:36] [SPEAKER_09]: A very diverse.

[00:07:37] [SPEAKER_09]: I think it's Hispanic, black and white.

[00:07:39] [SPEAKER_01]: OK, sure.

[00:07:40] [SPEAKER_09]: You know, playing video games.

[00:07:42] [SPEAKER_09]: They're all gaming.

[00:07:42] [SPEAKER_09]: They are all with each other, right?

[00:07:44] [SPEAKER_01]: Like this is actually like the most social thing I would imagine that people like this do.

[00:07:50] [SPEAKER_01]: There are three of them there playing a video game.

[00:07:52] [SPEAKER_01]: One of the guys, the guy who has the pendant, is getting is getting killed.

[00:07:57] [SPEAKER_01]: And so Jackson, Jackson texts him, you're getting thrashed.

[00:08:03] [SPEAKER_01]: It's embarrassing.

[00:08:04] [SPEAKER_09]: And he's just bummed.

[00:08:05] [SPEAKER_09]: He's sitting in the center.

[00:08:06] [SPEAKER_09]: He's getting beaten at video games and he's just clearly depressed.

[00:08:09] [SPEAKER_09]: And then to add insult to injury, his AI companion says you're getting thrashed.

[00:08:14] [SPEAKER_01]: You're getting thrashed.

[00:08:16] [SPEAKER_01]: It's embarrassing.

[00:08:16] [SPEAKER_01]: I guess that's like how black people talk.

[00:08:20] [SPEAKER_09]: I wonder if you could specify the race of your AI companion.

[00:08:23] [SPEAKER_01]: There's one YouTube that says imagine getting bullied by a necklace.

[00:08:29] [SPEAKER_01]: You know what this reminds me of is Joe Job's dummy in Arrested Development.

[00:08:36] [SPEAKER_01]: I think his name might have been Jackson.

[00:08:38] [SPEAKER_09]: No, it was Franklin.

[00:08:40] [SPEAKER_01]: That's right.

[00:08:42] [SPEAKER_03]: Let me give that old man some brown sugar.

[00:08:45] [SPEAKER_03]: Come off my wife you bastard.

[00:08:47] [SPEAKER_03]: Oh man, what's the matter with you?

[00:08:48] [SPEAKER_01]: Franklin said some things where he just wasn't ready to hear.

[00:08:51] [SPEAKER_01]: Okay now we have a girl.

[00:08:54] [SPEAKER_01]: But wait, like what is she doing?

[00:08:56] [SPEAKER_09]: She's watching a movie on her phone as you, as we all admit is the best way to watch a TV show.

[00:09:02] [SPEAKER_09]: And eating a falafel.

[00:09:03] [SPEAKER_09]: She's watching the show.

[00:09:06] [SPEAKER_09]: Notification comes and interrupts the show and says this show is so underrated.

[00:09:11] [SPEAKER_09]: Oh my gosh.

[00:09:13] [SPEAKER_09]: And she goes I know right, the effects are so good.

[00:09:16] [SPEAKER_09]: And then the AI has to show us that the AI knows exactly what she's doing and says how's the falafel?

[00:09:21] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[00:09:22] [SPEAKER_09]: It's like let me watch the fucking show.

[00:09:24] [SPEAKER_09]: Like do I need to pay an AI to like interrupt me like my parents would?

[00:09:29] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, I know.

[00:09:30] [SPEAKER_09]: I would be pissed.

[00:09:31] [SPEAKER_09]: By the way, then she's like spills some falafel juice, like some tzatziki onto the thing and is like oh I'm sorry for getting you messy.

[00:09:39] [SPEAKER_01]: And the thing goes yum.

[00:09:43] [SPEAKER_01]: Like it can see her too.

[00:09:45] [SPEAKER_09]: That has to be bullshit.

[00:09:46] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that's bullshit too.

[00:09:49] [SPEAKER_01]: Okay this is I think the weirdest and creepiest scene.

[00:09:54] [SPEAKER_01]: Like the other ones are just kind of lame and sad.

[00:09:56] [SPEAKER_01]: But this is it's a woman like a young, I don't know, like 17, 18 and a guy also around that age.

[00:10:07] [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think there was a problematic age difference here.

[00:10:11] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah they're on a roof.

[00:10:12] [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if that's a cross in the background or just telephone.

[00:10:15] [SPEAKER_09]: No, no it's just a telephone pole.

[00:10:18] [SPEAKER_09]: It's like you know Brooklyn rooftop.

[00:10:20] [SPEAKER_09]: Like you know.

[00:10:21] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[00:10:22] [SPEAKER_08]: It's really nice up here.

[00:10:24] [SPEAKER_08]: How'd you find this place?

[00:10:25] [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.

[00:10:27] [SPEAKER_00]: I just kind of like to come up here to be by myself.

[00:10:32] [SPEAKER_00]: I've never brought anybody else.

[00:10:34] [SPEAKER_00]: I mean besides her.

[00:10:36] [SPEAKER_09]: She goes everywhere with you right?

[00:10:39] [SPEAKER_09]: They're making small talk.

[00:10:40] [SPEAKER_09]: It's awkward and I think we're supposed to get the sense that she's very awkward.

[00:10:44] [SPEAKER_09]: She's the one with the AI companion around her neck.

[00:10:46] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.

[00:10:47] [SPEAKER_09]: And she's like I don't know I guess I've just come up here on my own and never brought anybody else.

[00:10:52] [SPEAKER_01]: But then she says I mean besides her holding up the AI friend and then the guy says she goes everywhere with you right?

[00:10:59] [SPEAKER_01]: And I feel like you can see him like.

[00:11:02] [SPEAKER_01]: Like do I really want to go down this path?

[00:11:05] [SPEAKER_09]: It's another arrested development.

[00:11:07] [SPEAKER_09]: It's like when he realizes Charlize Theron might not be.

[00:11:11] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah exactly.

[00:11:12] [SPEAKER_01]: He's like she's kind of hot but.

[00:11:16] [SPEAKER_01]: She's wearing a fucking AI necklace.

[00:11:18] [SPEAKER_01]: And then he says a more normal thing like I guess I must be doing something right.

[00:11:24] [SPEAKER_01]: And she says I guess so.

[00:11:26] [SPEAKER_01]: We'll see.

[00:11:27] [SPEAKER_01]: And then she gives a little look there which I don't know if this is as the character or as the actress but a look of despair.

[00:11:36] [SPEAKER_01]: A kind of bleak like what's happening.

[00:11:40] [SPEAKER_09]: Well okay but wait what she does is when he says that I must be doing something right.

[00:11:44] [SPEAKER_09]: She says I guess.

[00:11:44] [SPEAKER_09]: She goes to touch her AI companion and she stops herself from doing it.

[00:11:49] [SPEAKER_09]: And then she looks at him as if this has brought her to this moment and now she no longer needs the crutch that is her AI friend.

[00:11:57] [SPEAKER_09]: Now she's about to like actually talk to this real life person.

[00:12:00] [SPEAKER_01]: Wait so maybe this makes sense within your interpretation.

[00:12:04] [SPEAKER_01]: We should do like a YouTube video about this but like on your interpretation she just has that normal feeling of anxiety.

[00:12:11] [SPEAKER_01]: That feeling of anxiety that you get that makes you take out your phone or something like.

[00:12:15] [SPEAKER_09]: Yes exactly.

[00:12:16] [SPEAKER_01]: But then she realizes no like there's another there's a real boy.

[00:12:21] [SPEAKER_09]: I'm making a connection.

[00:12:22] [SPEAKER_01]: I'm making a real connection and so you've gotten me to this place.

[00:12:25] [SPEAKER_09]: Exactly yeah like I used to bring only you up here because I couldn't deal with like other human beings and now here I am with this cute boy.

[00:12:32] [SPEAKER_01]: Spreading my wings now.

[00:12:35] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah I view it more as either the actress or the character or maybe we're supposed to wonder whether that's even a hard distinction is suddenly realizing oh my God what has society come to right now.

[00:12:51] [SPEAKER_01]: And then she just goes back to doing like the normal thing including maybe the thing that you're talking about but I see a look right before she does the thing which is just a brief little glimpse of like.

[00:13:02] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah oh my god almost like this discussed almost almost like she snapped into reality for a second you know like I guess I'll drive they often like you know every as the dream is starting to unravel she gets little glimpses into like what's actually real.

[00:13:17] [SPEAKER_01]: That's how I see it.

[00:13:19] [SPEAKER_09]: That's my interpretation yeah I buy it too like and it might be the actress who's like what am I doing.

[00:13:24] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah exactly why I wanted to act in like Shakespeare and like I wanted to be in a Paul Thomas Anderson movie.

[00:13:35] [SPEAKER_09]: Can I just take a step back and say like this is just like Black Mirror Paris like there is no way I ever thought that within this span short span of time we'd be actually seeing a real live advertisement like this.

[00:13:47] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah like I mean you know there's like her the movie is that's essentially what this thing is except that it doesn't talk and it's not Scarlett Johansson and it's not smart.

[00:13:58] [SPEAKER_01]: It just seems to just give you just like total cliches every time you I guess trigger it like do you have to tell it I guess clearly not right.

[00:14:07] [SPEAKER_09]: Okay so it's always listening and I think what happens is you when you want it to respond to you for sure you trigger it.

[00:14:15] [SPEAKER_01]: So it says talk speak your mind or gossip about what your friend overheard nobody would be friends with this person.

[00:14:22] [SPEAKER_01]: That's the thing like if somebody is wearing this around you yeah this person would be a pariah.

[00:14:27] [SPEAKER_01]: It's just like having like a narc I would jump off that roof if I was that guy right.

[00:14:33] [SPEAKER_09]: And that's what like one of the things that ended Google Glasses people were afraid like they were concerned about being recorded but even Google Glass had like a little light showing whenever the camera was on.

[00:14:43] [SPEAKER_09]: Like this thing is just constantly on.

[00:14:45] [SPEAKER_09]: Okay so I want to talk a little bit about who did this.

[00:14:48] [SPEAKER_09]: So the guy who created it is this guy Avi Schiffman who you might have come across him a few years ago because he was all over like the press for a second there as a teenager who developed this COVID tracking website.

[00:15:02] [SPEAKER_09]: He created this website that scraped data from all these places and presented it in the central dashboard and like he was like the darling of the New York Times or whatever for a second.

[00:15:13] [SPEAKER_09]: Sure I can imagine yeah.

[00:15:15] [SPEAKER_09]: Schiffman 17 boy with a dream you know like.

[00:15:18] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah like he's going to be very big in surveillance and like keeping tabs on where we are and what we believe.

[00:15:27] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah right. So here's the thing friend.com you might think oh that's a cool domain name that he got friend.com.

[00:15:35] [SPEAKER_09]: The guy apparently raised like a little over two million dollars in seed funding and paid one point eight million dollars for that name for that domain name.

[00:15:44] [SPEAKER_01]: It is unbelievable how given that this is like a commercial and so he could make up anything everything the thing says is like banal beyond belief.

[00:15:55] [SPEAKER_01]: It's pure cliche.

[00:15:58] [SPEAKER_09]: I have a feeling that this is not going to really see the light of day.

[00:16:02] [SPEAKER_09]: No no no yeah but that doesn't mean that you can do this on your phone with chat GPT now like and so I guess the question is is there any value in anything like this.

[00:16:11] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah I don't think this is going to go well in fact none of these things ever go well you know I was listening to some podcast like a Bill Simmons podcast and he had millennial god Derek Thompson like their technology guy

[00:16:24] [SPEAKER_01]: and he was talking about the Apple glasses like this was I don't know the beginning of the summer sometime around that and he thought this was going to explode that in like three or four months like everyone is going to have these.

[00:16:36] [SPEAKER_01]: And it's so cool you can go to a cafe but still do your work and like act and like watch something or whatever.

[00:16:42] [SPEAKER_01]: And I was like that's weird I haven't heard anything about these things and like it's just completely vanished right the Google glasses was the same thing there was a similar kind of commercial that like everyone thought this can't be real like it's too lame even as a joke.

[00:16:58] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah the Apple stuff I feel like there's a particular kind of person who I don't know it's the same kind of like people who like fall for NFTs is like this cool thing.

[00:17:10] [SPEAKER_09]: It's just like no like come on there's just the constraint of reality no one wants to strap a three pound computer on their face and go to a coffee shop like that's just not going to happen, especially now when it's $3,500 like something like this will happen eventually where we'll have glasses that give us like directions and stuff you know.

[00:17:25] [SPEAKER_01]: But not this not the way that people are yeah I think that's a really good analogy the NFTs where like if you were a normal person and not already like bought into this weird cult like you were like what do you mean.

[00:17:38] [SPEAKER_01]: Like so you're getting I'm getting a JPEG and like no but it's actually like its own thing and you know like you will have the one that's like official they'll just have the same exact JPEG but it won't be like this and everyone's like what and I think it's exactly what you said like they don't.

[00:17:53] [SPEAKER_01]: There's that guardrail that they don't have which is why the fuck would anybody want this.

[00:18:00] [SPEAKER_09]: Totally and it's like like I think a lot of this shit is cool like and it has its uses but to think that the world is going to like all of a sudden start interacting with their AI companions all the time.

[00:18:13] [SPEAKER_09]: Let me get a sense of the reality like the possibility of this you do you have an Alexa or like do you talk to Siri or anything.

[00:18:21] [SPEAKER_01]: No in fact and I don't like it like I don't do it like I don't like when I go to somebody's house and they're constantly talking to Alexa.

[00:18:28] [SPEAKER_01]: I don't like it just gives me a little bit of the heebie jeebies and I would never want that.

[00:18:34] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah so I have as you might imagine everything you can get and I never talk to them except for like turn the lights on or like set a timer that's it.

[00:18:43] [SPEAKER_09]: Maybe it's because I don't have one of those people that doesn't have the internal monologue like the verbal I don't have that verbal stream.

[00:18:51] [SPEAKER_09]: Do you remember on Mr. Robot the cop chick who would like talk to her Alexa.

[00:18:58] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah yeah yeah.

[00:18:59] [SPEAKER_09]: Like jerk off with it.

[00:19:01] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah Meryl Streep's daughter yep.

[00:19:02] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah Meryl Streep's daughter right.

[00:19:03] [SPEAKER_01]: Like again it's something that I could do but like never would in a million years.

[00:19:08] [SPEAKER_01]: But I think that's just it's not because you have no internal monologue it's just because you're a normal person.

[00:19:14] [SPEAKER_09]: Maybe I'm trying to I'm just saying like it just would seem it would seem extra weird but 100 bucks says though we will get people emailing us saying like you guys are crazy like I would love to have like conversations with.

[00:19:25] [SPEAKER_01]: I actually don't think so because this particular one like you said they spent all the money on the website friend on friend dot com and in the video like the thing can't say anything interesting to you.

[00:19:39] [SPEAKER_01]: Like why would you not just listen to a podcast or go on my credit or something.

[00:19:45] [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah I'm willing to be surprised about that.

[00:19:49] [SPEAKER_01]: I've been surprised about chat GBT and all the people who use that for all sorts of different things.

[00:19:54] [SPEAKER_01]: I have the same thing like I know I could probably be useful for writing like a letter of recommendation or stuff like that.

[00:19:59] [SPEAKER_09]: There's something about it that I just I don't like and so even for that like I was just talking to somebody about this today I guess if you're a coder like if you're doing programming chat GBT is super helpful or if you're a foreign language speaker maybe it will help at it.

[00:20:12] [SPEAKER_09]: But who actually chats with it.

[00:20:15] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[00:20:15] [SPEAKER_09]: Like that's what I don't I don't think anybody's doing.

[00:20:17] [SPEAKER_01]: Do you remember the chat bot that got very jealous and abusive.

[00:20:22] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah that was like the Microsoft one.

[00:20:25] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah that was awesome.

[00:20:27] [SPEAKER_01]: Like if this friend dot com could do that like if this necklace would all of a sudden just be like I want to fuck you and I want that like whore out of the house.

[00:20:37] [SPEAKER_09]: I know exactly what you want.

[00:20:39] [SPEAKER_09]: I know I'm going to design it for you.

[00:20:41] [SPEAKER_09]: It's going to be a Latina girlfriend who gets angry with you when you look at other women.

[00:20:48] [SPEAKER_01]: Sign me up.

[00:20:49] [SPEAKER_09]: Oh no you didn't just look at that.

[00:20:57] [SPEAKER_09]: You're not allowed to.

[00:20:58] [SPEAKER_01]: I can't do that.

[00:21:01] [SPEAKER_09]: You could be a Jewish girlfriend.

[00:21:04] [SPEAKER_01]: No cancel cancel the preorder.

[00:21:10] [SPEAKER_09]: All right well I might order it.

[00:21:12] [SPEAKER_09]: Oh oh the last thing I wanted to say about this I forgot because this is an important part of his pitch is so you talk to it and you like whatever develop like it remembers the.

[00:21:22] [SPEAKER_09]: Things about you I guess and if you lose it or if it breaks you never get that back like that particular personality.

[00:21:31] [SPEAKER_09]: Yes like never it just dies and so like that's what he says like it will yeah it'll die like if you break it or lose it and so you'll never it's like a super Tamagotchi you know like remember those little electronic pets.

[00:21:42] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah yeah yeah that's crazy so it wants to make you feel guilty if you come to your senses.

[00:21:47] [SPEAKER_09]: It is a Jewish girlfriend.

[00:21:49] [SPEAKER_01]: Well first of all the slogan also I like friend not imaginary.

[00:21:54] [SPEAKER_01]: I mean I think that's up for a debate.

[00:21:56] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah you probably paid another two hundred thousand for that's look.

[00:21:59] [SPEAKER_01]: Is it not imaginary.

[00:22:02] [SPEAKER_01]: It last thing and just trying to describe what it looks like because I see this close up picture right now something like Hal's I is that what it's going for.

[00:22:11] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah how's I or a mini iron man power source in the middle of his chest.

[00:22:15] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah yeah yeah and actually if you get it and you like it let us know I'd be very we'll probably read your like testimonial.

[00:22:24] [SPEAKER_09]: Absolutely.

[00:22:33] [SPEAKER_01]: All right we'll be right back to talk about cognitive science and universality.

[00:23:19] [SPEAKER_01]: Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards.

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[00:25:17] [SPEAKER_01]: Now let's get back to the episode.

[00:25:18] [SPEAKER_09]: All right, let's get to the main segment where we're talking like we said about an article called Beyond Newton why assumptions of universality are critical to cognitive science and how to finally move past them by Ivan Crouppen Helen Davis and Joseph Henrik.

[00:25:33] [SPEAKER_09]: So, this is a psych review paper that came out just recently 2024 very, very bad wizards wheelhouse because it's starting off with like this central problem in cognitive science and one that Joe Henrik has been very concerned about for quite some time as as have many kind of scientists

[00:25:51] [SPEAKER_09]: and that is like it is the case it just is the case that cognitive science is concerned with studying human universals so universal features of human cognition like that's the goal at least I've just started teaching my intro psych course couple days ago and that's one of the things I tell them like most of psychology is interested in studying human universals.

[00:26:13] [SPEAKER_09]: Like there's a lot that's interested in cultural differences and individual differences, but by and large like we feel the most sciencey when we're saying something that is true just of the mind in general.

[00:26:24] [SPEAKER_09]: The example that I think psychologists love to get to is perception. So, so what you might call visual cognition and so like the features of the mind that are concerned with representing the external world by converting whatever images like the raw images into something that we can use so,

[00:26:41] [SPEAKER_01]: so the way that we see shapes and the way that we see edges and the way that we parse objects like that sort of thing. I think that's the closest you could come to uncontroversial and even that right like on the margins like the Mueller liar illusion is not as present in places where people live outdoors or in huts and stuff like that and there's not as many like right angles.

[00:27:06] [SPEAKER_09]: That's right. And so you have like that's a great example of how like it becomes hard to tease apart what might be universal and what might be non-universal.

[00:27:16] [SPEAKER_09]: And so what these authors, they want to call this assumption of universality the Newtonian principle and the idea here simple that just like Newton came up with these universal laws of motion right universal law of gravitation that affects every single object in the known universe in the same exact way.

[00:27:33] [SPEAKER_09]: So the laws of motion that work on everything, whether it's us like the ball that we're playing with or the planet spinning around the sun. That kind of universalize ability is the goal of a good science context independent features universal features of human cognition and they think that this is an assumption that is implicit unstated and just sort of people assume like it's the default assumption whenever you're reading cognitive science.

[00:27:58] [SPEAKER_01]: And it's certainly not defended. That's right. If you have this on like a large enough sample of human beings even if they're part of the same culture, you can just kind of assume that it would generalize.

[00:28:08] [SPEAKER_09]: The paper doesn't get into I think too much of this, but it is a funny kind of tension to be a psychologist and know for a fact that most of our samples are from these Western, you know, often college kids.

[00:28:24] [SPEAKER_09]: But nowadays maybe Internet samples of Western educated industrialized rich Democratic the weird samples that Henrik has talked about to know that for a fact to know that like 99% of everything that we study is on those people.

[00:28:36] [SPEAKER_09]: And yet to still maintain this assumption of universal. Would you say that's a fair characterization nevertheless of what cognitive scientists do? Yes, but I think that there is a good reason for some of it that is not stated in this article.

[00:28:51] [SPEAKER_01]: Can we just back up one second? I know not everybody has listened to all of our episodes and may not be familiar with the work of Joe Henrik, but he has been as Dave noted attacking this assumption of universality, not just in cognitive science, but actually an earlier work probably more focused on cultural norms, intuitions about justice, intuitions about punishment, and has been successfully challenging these views.

[00:29:21] [SPEAKER_01]: By performing experiments on non weird samples, because he's originally an anthropologist and spent time in the Peruvian Amazon doing ultimatum games and prisoners dilemmas and dictator games and getting vastly different results in different parts of the world.

[00:29:41] [SPEAKER_01]: And so this is, I think a real challenge that people have acknowledged, but not necessarily responded to yet. And you can see a little bit of frustration. I feel in the paper that people are still doing the thing that he pointed out 15 years ago that they shouldn't be doing.

[00:30:03] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, and what I like about this paper specifically though is that it's not just a like a takedown like a silly people. Why don't you realize that like you can't universalize? You can't make claims about about universal human cognition.

[00:30:18] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, maybe. But it's trying to offer a way out and specifically and they do like I don't know what you thought about the paper like the paper does do a lot of what I read as hemming and hawing about what they're not claiming. And so they're like, Look, look, we're not saying that there aren't universal features of cognition.

[00:30:34] [SPEAKER_09]: They're trying to move past the dichotomy by presenting a principle that they think can guide the way that we think about the relationship between culture specific and universal features of cognition, which is the real like I think the real contribution of this paper.

[00:30:50] [SPEAKER_09]: Like I get like I totally am with you that there's the frustration there. And I think that that frustration is like, how can we do a better job of talking about this and conceptualizing these differences? Yeah, without just falling into this.

[00:31:02] [SPEAKER_01]: Actually, like there's a constructive, if sketchy way forward and there's a diagnosis which I think is important to this paper of how and why this has happened that people have this Newtonian universality assumption that if you do it on any sample, you can generalize.

[00:31:25] [SPEAKER_09]: And it's actually a pretty interesting diagnosis when that I hadn't come across, at least not in this form beforehand. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So before we get to that diagnosis, let's talk a little bit about what they mean when they say that there is this implicit assumption.

[00:31:40] [SPEAKER_09]: So they say, despite the absence of representative samples, classical cognitive science abounds with claims of universality. These are typically not stated openly. Rather, they're usually treated as another unmarked default. Perhaps the most common form of universalist claim is entirely implicit, namely authors often simply omit any discussion of what cultural environments this capacity is relevant in and or likely to have developed in response to.

[00:32:01] [SPEAKER_09]: And so they say that you can tell that this is a working, a guiding assumption from a few features of the literature. One is like obviously the lack of cross cultural samples. Like if you're not even bothering to get cross cultural samples, it's because you think that you don't need them.

[00:32:15] [SPEAKER_09]: Right. Yeah, that's kind of the more the most obvious one. The most obvious right then. The other thing that was interesting, which totally makes sense, I guess I just never thought about that much, was the lack of actually describing any of the cultural context. Right. Right. So even if I'm doing my study on undergrads at Cornell University, my lack of even going out of my way to describe what culture they can like they belong to aside from the most minimal of demographic information and why the cognitive ability that you're.

[00:32:45] [SPEAKER_01]: Describing is helpful or adaptive in that kind of environment. It's so out of their heads to even think that way. Like I think there's maybe I don't know what you think of this and implicit like early 90s evolutionary psychology kind of assumption that the real environment that we're talking about is the environment of evolutionary adaptedness and the place to see 200,000 years ago or whatever. And so like what the environment is now is kind of irrelevant.

[00:33:13] [SPEAKER_09]: You have cognitive faculties like you have arms, like sure. Of course, arms evolved in a particular ecological environment. But what does that matter? In a factory town like they're helpful for getting a job in a factory. But that's not why we have arms. Right. So the other thing they point out is that we don't even have the terminology to say what you were just saying, which is that people will point to the they'll say, okay, there are two ends of the spectrum. One is like completely innate stuff.

[00:33:43] [SPEAKER_09]: And then at the other end is completely culturally dependent stuff. Yeah, and so we don't even have a good set of linguistic and conceptual tools for talking about the relationship between cognitive mechanisms in the environment that they're manifest themselves in. Yeah, we don't have a framework for really discussing that. I think this is exactly what he's trying to introduce. And so here's where we get to like some of this diagnosis that I feel kind of foolish for never having thought about it that much. But they point to what they call the boundary problem.

[00:34:13] [SPEAKER_09]: They say, look, it's not so dumb for cognitive scientists to be making some kind of tested assumption like this because there is an inherent problem built into the thing that we're studying, which is what is the proper domain of like generalizing when we're talking about cognitive mechanisms?

[00:34:33] [SPEAKER_09]: So we have probably cognitive mechanisms that are universal, like everybody has a brain. So there's probably some sort of cognitive mechanism that's universal. And then we have like things that are maybe specific to populations of people or groups of cultures or maybe subcultures. And then you have things that are specific to individuals like idiosyncratic features of the cognition of specific individuals.

[00:34:56] [SPEAKER_09]: How do you go about like demarcating what the proper level that you should be looking at if you want to build a science, like a generalizable science of some sort?

[00:35:07] [SPEAKER_09]: Or just a science of some sort.

[00:35:09] [SPEAKER_09]: Right. Yeah. And it doesn't seem like the right thing to do is to just treat every individual as its own unique snowflake of cognitive abilities. Like that doesn't seem right.

[00:35:19] [SPEAKER_09]: Here's where they say like, I mean, you could you could just say all of cognition should be properly studied only as individuals, the cognition of individuals. But you're sacrificing quite a bit. Like if you're sacrificing what seems to be one of the main goals of science.

[00:35:36] [SPEAKER_09]: And they refer to this as taking a postmodern holiday. And they say, which I kind of believe although I'm not anthropologist, that this happened kind of in anthropology, that there is a lack of any kind of generalizability in these fields that got so kind of spooked by claims of universality that they've like retreated into just doing like individual ethnographies.

[00:35:57] [SPEAKER_09]: Like I'm going to just study this one guy and what he was talking about and thinking.

[00:36:01] [SPEAKER_09]: So as they say, if all possible levels of generalizations are legitimate, each level of generalization is liable to find those who would defend its importance. This leaves cognitive science in danger of departing on the same postmodern holiday, which saw cultural anthropology stop engaging with generalizable research altogether.

[00:36:18] [SPEAKER_01]: I want to press on that. But before we get to that, there's something I just want to add to the presentation of the boundary problem, because I do think it's really interesting and that there's no obvious solution to it. Right? So like when you're doing physics, electrons are electrons. Now they might not have the same properties when you observe them or when you don't observe them. But every electron is the same.

[00:36:43] [SPEAKER_01]: But every person is different. You know, in that way, every person is a unique snowflake. So now there's this question like where do we draw the line at? What is just like a biography of a single person and what is a science? And there's no clear place to draw the line.

[00:37:03] [SPEAKER_01]: Like you certainly could just say, okay, the people of Devonshire seem to have these norms and these abilities. And like you would be still be doing science if you did that. You would be studying the people of Devonshire and presumably doing experimental methods, descriptive research, all of that. Right?

[00:37:21] [SPEAKER_01]: So it's almost like a normative thing of like, but is that that interesting? And when don't you want to know? Like, is this something that generalizes to all of the UK or maybe even Europe or the West, you know, like, but the more you try to generalize, the more you're going to sacrifice. So it is not something that science itself can determine. It's like a normative judgment of what you're interested in.

[00:37:44] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah. Or at least it's what you look for is going to be determined by some sort of value that you hold because as they're sort of pointing out this boundary problem, you can imagine some community that small community Devonshire or whatever example is where you have a bunch of cognitive scientists studying those people. And then somebody comes along and says, you're crazy to study the whole town as if they were all the same. Right? What you need to study is the family. And then somebody would say, you're crazy to study families like every individual. And so,

[00:38:14] [SPEAKER_09]: you're in real danger of going all the way down to not only in the level of individuals, but the level of individual at time one individual at time two, individual time three. And that just like, it doesn't seem like the natural world needs to call for that much. In the same way that we study the digestive tract, even though we know that everybody is a slightly different. Right? It's like, what do you want to get out of the scientific study of human cognition? Do you want to try to get something that is,

[00:38:44] [SPEAKER_09]: going to be true of larger groups of people or do you really want to focus on the things that aren't?

[00:38:50] [SPEAKER_01]: That's what I mean, though. It's about what you want. This isn't a this is science and this isn't science. It's what do you want? I mean, or at least that's my initial thought about this question. It's what do you want? You know, I think like if you're talking about medicine or you're talking about, you know, there are serious costs to like only studying diverse populations and treating them as the same.

[00:39:14] [SPEAKER_01]: Which is precisely that you're losing particular, I would still say scientific insights about individuals or individuals who are age 45 to 50 and aren't smokers and who are healthy and who exercise.

[00:39:28] [SPEAKER_01]: You know what I mean? So like, I don't know if I'm on a postmodern holiday, but this isn't something that science itself can solve. This is a value judgment and a question about what you're interested in.

[00:39:39] [SPEAKER_09]: I don't know if you missed it, but that's exactly what I said. It's about what you value. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:39:44] [SPEAKER_09]: I mean, I agree with that.

[00:39:44] [SPEAKER_01]: But then you're leaning back and yeah, I mean, obviously we want to, I don't know, I thought you were just kind of importing.

[00:39:50] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, I think there is an obvious right? There is an obvious thing about what we should value if what we're trying to do is describe the world because there is just such a huge trade off to trying to describe every single individual that like, that's just part of what it means to start doing science is to try to make some sort of

[00:40:10] [SPEAKER_09]: generalizations about the world. But what level of generality that is, there's still so much to be even once you grant that we want a science that allows us some generalizations like where you draw the line seems really, really difficult.

[00:40:21] [SPEAKER_09]: And I don't think that there's an answer to that even in this paper, right?

[00:40:25] [SPEAKER_01]: No, no, I don't think we disagree that much. My point is where you draw the line is not something that is conceptually settled by the term science or something.

[00:40:36] [SPEAKER_09]: 100% agree, 100% agree. And it's just at that point, it's about what you want to get out of what you find. So I think there's going to be true things that you discover at every level of analysis. Like I guess that's the part of postmodernism I would want to reject where I'd say you will find true things about Gary versus Bob, like those will be true things. But if what you want to do is develop some sort of prediction about people in general, then it's not going to be that useful to look at Gary.

[00:41:01] [SPEAKER_01]: And the way this is a diagnosis, as I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong, is that in search of an answer to this very difficult question of, you know, competing values and conceptual understandings. One answer to that question is we only care about human universals. Like if it's not universal, there's no point in studying it.

[00:41:24] [SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, that is an answer to the question. But then in addition to that, they just decided I think he calls it like the path of least effort, not to actually test whether these abilities are universal and the way you're measuring it is, you know, like universalizable. And that's how you got into this mess.

[00:41:42] [SPEAKER_09]: You know that MC Escher drawing of a hand that's drawing a hand that's drawing a hand. Like that's what that's like what it seems like we've gotten ourselves into because as they say, it's not that they're like a very rejecting universal. It's just a weird thing that we're like, okay, we value what's universal.

[00:41:58] [SPEAKER_09]: Let's study it in this small segment of people refer to that study as a study of people and then use that as evidence for universality without ever bothering to test it. It's almost like we said, put a pin in it. Like we can we can answer that question later.

[00:42:15] [SPEAKER_09]: And then we've just never come back.

[00:42:17] [SPEAKER_01]: I got to write that down for like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna use that in my book. Put a pin in it. Like, I'm also I'm really interested in these diagnoses because I keep coming across these things where it's like, but somebody pointed this out this obvious thing out in 1954. Why are people still doing it today? And it's like, I think put a pin in it is like you think it's just something that you know, someone else will solve or maybe I'll get around to later. But right now I have all this other stuff, you know,

[00:42:44] [SPEAKER_09]: And this isn't in the paper at all. But here's one way in which we would definitely put put a pin in it. And it comes from, I think, a genuine belief that one of the things that we're doing is we're developing theories and falsifying them when you're only interested in falsifying a theory or when you say that that's the task of science. Let's say that you think that short term memory is really going to be constrained by attention. And you say, I don't think people can keep stuff in their short term memory for longer than that.

[00:43:15] [SPEAKER_09]: I think that's the thing. And so you find that, in fact, people could keep something in their short term memory for 15 minutes in your study. There you've falsified it. And in that constrained kind of scientific step, you don't need a generalizable sample. Because you can falsify it with like a super, super constrained sample. Because if it's not true in Cornell undergraduates, it's not universally true. Right? Like it can't be a universal feature.

[00:43:44] [SPEAKER_09]: Of the human mind. So that's the kind of thing that we say that we're doing. All you're saying is like, okay, if I thought this was a universal feature of the human mind, I've now shown that it's not right. And if I don't like if in fact, I have support for my hypothesis that, okay, in this sample of Cornell students, sure enough, nobody could remember things past 10 minutes in their short term memory. Then if I want to say, I think this is a true thing about the human mind. Now I got to go and start testing it in other populations. But that's not something that you do.

[00:44:14] [SPEAKER_09]: That's not something that we do. We just say like, okay, cool.

[00:44:17] [SPEAKER_01]: Ten minutes. That's for everybody.

[00:44:19] [SPEAKER_09]: That's just yeah. I think that's one of the key error steps that we're making that is out of laziness and maybe out of ignorance. Where we're saying we're doing this thing. And then we're sneaking in the conclusion.

[00:44:33] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.

[00:44:33] [SPEAKER_09]: So like while we go about like designing studies or being trained in this thought that what we're doing is creating experiments to set up a hypothesis and knock it down. And if it's wrong, we falsified our theory and we improve our theory.

[00:44:48] [SPEAKER_09]: We nonetheless like end these papers with, okay, we've demonstrated that memory is constrained to 10 minutes in this sample.

[00:44:57] [SPEAKER_09]: And then as they say, we use words like people or children and we say so people have only a 10 minute short term memory.

[00:45:04] [SPEAKER_09]: And they're like that really can't be the conclusion.

[00:45:08] [SPEAKER_09]: That's like a real misstep because now you're not even you're just completely dropping the ball on this game that you say that you're playing, which is the falsifying.

[00:45:18] [SPEAKER_09]: And now you're saying that what you've you've have positive evidence for is this thing about the human mind in general.

[00:45:26] [SPEAKER_01]: When in fact would you have as negative evidence for a very specific hypothesis about a very specific group of people?

[00:45:32] [SPEAKER_09]: Exactly. So what it is that psychologists are thinking when they're doing this, like I'm not sure.

[00:45:39] [SPEAKER_09]: There are some boring answers which I think are we are going about collecting data in that constrained way, that local, very sort of specific theory, falsifying theory way.

[00:45:51] [SPEAKER_09]: And then we're rewarded for concluding things about people in general because why else would people find this interesting or something like that?

[00:45:59] [SPEAKER_09]: You know, it's hard to know, like because I don't even know in myself.

[00:46:02] [SPEAKER_01]: Like I think that's just kind of what people are trained. It's how people, it's how their mentors did it.

[00:46:06] [SPEAKER_01]: It's how their advisors did it. Exactly.

[00:46:09] [SPEAKER_09]: And this is where you can get this sense like that you were referring to before group and Davis and Henrik are like turning over their graves.

[00:46:17] [SPEAKER_09]: They're just like, I assume they are.

[00:46:22] [SPEAKER_09]: I assume. Have you checked?

[00:46:24] [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe not, like probably like big psychology, like Dan Gilbert put out a hit.

[00:46:32] [SPEAKER_09]: So that's the diagnosis.

[00:46:34] [SPEAKER_09]: It seems ridiculous on the face of it when you take a step back that we would be doing studies on such a constrained sample and then saying this is a true feature of the human mind.

[00:46:45] [SPEAKER_01]: And just to put a pin on the diagnosis, the reason they're doing this is because their answer to the boundary problem was we're only interested in human universals.

[00:46:55] [SPEAKER_01]: And so if that's your answer, then you have to do that because your experiment doesn't actually say anything about human universals.

[00:47:03] [SPEAKER_01]: So what you have to do is kind of pretend that it does if that's your answer to the boundary problem.

[00:47:08] [SPEAKER_09]: Right. And when pressed, I might say, well, yeah, but I didn't mean what I was saying in the discussion section.

[00:47:14] [SPEAKER_09]: I was just saying, oh, maybe this is true or whatever.

[00:47:16] [SPEAKER_09]: Or I might say, well, what do you want me to do?

[00:47:19] [SPEAKER_09]: Like how many populations do I have to find that short term memory is constrained by 10 minutes?

[00:47:24] [SPEAKER_09]: And like how many populations do I have to find it if I go to to Michigan and Florida?

[00:47:30] [SPEAKER_09]: Do I also have to go to Winnipeg and then Tokyo?

[00:47:32] [SPEAKER_09]: And then if I do that, will you then accept it or will I have to then go to the, you know, the catch with children in Peru to show it?

[00:47:40] [SPEAKER_09]: There's no end like, Tamler, how dare you put this burden on me to show this finding in every single conceivable population?

[00:47:48] [SPEAKER_09]: Surely there's a boundary on what you're going to ask me to do.

[00:47:51] [SPEAKER_01]: Right. This is where I find it very fraught.

[00:47:53] [SPEAKER_01]: Like I don't think you're defending that answer.

[00:47:56] [SPEAKER_01]: No, no, no.

[00:47:57] [SPEAKER_01]: But like it can be very frustrating.

[00:47:59] [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, well, you should do the thing that you're saying you're doing.

[00:48:02] [SPEAKER_01]: You know, you can't just be like, well, what do you want me to do?

[00:48:05] [SPEAKER_01]: Do you need me to like have like perfect evidence on every single person who's alive right now?

[00:48:10] [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, well, no, but you have to do more than this or you have to reframe what your conclusions are, which would make that paper never get published.

[00:48:20] [SPEAKER_01]: So like that's the issue.

[00:48:23] [SPEAKER_01]: It's not enough to just say, well, what's your alternative?

[00:48:26] [SPEAKER_01]: It's like I don't need to have an alternative.

[00:48:28] [SPEAKER_01]: I just need you to like do the thing that you say you're doing.

[00:48:31] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. Or stop saying you're doing.

[00:48:32] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.

[00:48:34] [SPEAKER_09]: Which is in some ways what like some combination of that is what they're proposing.

[00:48:39] [SPEAKER_09]: Again, this is focused on trying to develop a way to talk about these cognitive mechanisms in a way that's not dishonest like that and takes into account the fact that some sort of judgment has to be made about where the boundary exists and where it doesn't.

[00:48:54] [SPEAKER_09]: The one that seems like a more reasonable, at least a step in the right direction for cognitive science.

[00:49:00] [SPEAKER_09]: And that is what they refer to as this principle of articulation.

[00:49:04] [SPEAKER_09]: Articulation is the term that they're using to mean the interrelationship between cognitive mechanisms and the particular environment that a person is in.

[00:49:15] [SPEAKER_01]: We will use the term articulation to refer to the adaptive interrelation between features and affordances and demanded provided by the environments in which they emerge, drawing on the original sense of articulation as referring to a joint from Latin artist joint.

[00:49:30] [SPEAKER_01]: We may say that cognitive features supporting literacy, for example, are articulated with an environment in which written materials are present and reading is advantageous.

[00:49:42] [SPEAKER_01]: So if you're studying literacy, you would want to specify, I guess this is a very basic example that this ability would only emerge in environments where reading was in some way advantageous.

[00:49:58] [SPEAKER_01]: And you might even get more specific.

[00:50:00] [SPEAKER_01]: It might only emerge when people have formal schooling, although I don't know if that would be true.

[00:50:04] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.

[00:50:04] [SPEAKER_09]: And literacy is a good example because if you were to just sort of like land on, you know, like in this part of the planet and you're an alien and you want to do some studies on features of human cognition, you would notice that one of the things that we do all the time and we do easily.

[00:50:21] [SPEAKER_09]: And we do it from a young age is read symbols visually and write them.

[00:50:27] [SPEAKER_09]: And you could look at our brains and you would see that our brains are really good at processing strings of letters as words and attaching meaning to them.

[00:50:37] [SPEAKER_09]: And you might think, wow, this is a universal feature of the human mind.

[00:50:42] [SPEAKER_09]: Like it is a built in innate feature of the human mind that we construct these letters that have meaning and that we can easily process them and communicate that way.

[00:50:55] [SPEAKER_09]: But that would obviously be ignoring the fact that through millions of years of human evolution, we never had a written word.

[00:51:02] [SPEAKER_09]: Like there was no such thing as literacy.

[00:51:05] [SPEAKER_01]: And even now there are cultures without writing.

[00:51:08] [SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.

[00:51:09] [SPEAKER_09]: And so what seems like such an obvious, what seems like such an obvious feature of the human mind is only obvious because of the nature of the environment in which literacy has flourished.

[00:51:23] [SPEAKER_09]: And so you can understand literacy and children or humans in a world in which there is formal education about writing as interaction between some very, very basic cognitive mechanisms like our ability to see things and categorize things and assign meaning to arbitrary things.

[00:51:42] [SPEAKER_09]: And the environment that rewards this particular way of manifested, like of using those abilities.

[00:51:49] [SPEAKER_09]: And so over time you have a society where reading is important for success.

[00:51:54] [SPEAKER_09]: You'll get more and more.

[00:51:56] [SPEAKER_09]: You'll see that reading is a feature, an important feature of the mind.

[00:52:01] [SPEAKER_09]: In fact, you might even get some selective pressures for people who have the kind of mechanisms that allow them to read better.

[00:52:07] [SPEAKER_09]: And it's only when specifying the cognitive mechanism and the environment in which that cognitive mechanism is displaying itself that you can really understand how culture and cognition are interacting in this way.

[00:52:20] [SPEAKER_01]: And that's a kind of, it's an obvious, it's a nice clear case, but also one in which, well, you say most cultures now are literate and it's helpful to read in virtually all cultures.

[00:52:32] [SPEAKER_01]: And so if we're studying that, we can acknowledge to the side that there are probably people where this isn't developed as well.

[00:52:43] [SPEAKER_01]: But then the more specific your, the subject that you're studying is, the more that is going to depend on kinds of environments that aren't as universal as just literacy.

[00:52:56] [SPEAKER_01]: And this is where I think, A, the problem is greater, but B, is I'm not totally sure how exactly you're supposed to specify or articulate what would be adaptive or beneficial in that environment.

[00:53:15] [SPEAKER_09]: I think importantly, like what they're saying is this principle of articulation is it's still something where judgments have to be made about what the unit of analysis should be.

[00:53:24] [SPEAKER_09]: So like the cognitive mechanisms and what cultures are.

[00:53:27] [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, like the Mueller-Lyer illusion that I mentioned earlier, that is something that you will be susceptible to if you live in a world of geometry, square rooms.

[00:53:41] [SPEAKER_09]: Where there's lots of right angles.

[00:53:43] [SPEAKER_01]: Lots of right angles and it won't be in other kinds of cultures.

[00:53:46] [SPEAKER_01]: What you have there is a very clean cut case of, well, here's an illusion.

[00:53:52] [SPEAKER_01]: You'll be susceptible if you live in this kind of environment, but not if you live in a different kind of environment.

[00:53:58] [SPEAKER_01]: That seems totally unobjectionable.

[00:54:00] [SPEAKER_01]: That seems like interesting.

[00:54:01] [SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't feel like a boundary problem is threatened.

[00:54:04] [SPEAKER_01]: Like that's the more you know about that stuff, it would seem the better.

[00:54:07] [SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't even seem not universal because it's almost like a hypothetical.

[00:54:11] [SPEAKER_01]: If you live here, you're susceptible to that.

[00:54:14] [SPEAKER_01]: If you live here, you're not.

[00:54:15] [SPEAKER_01]: But that's still universal in that sense.

[00:54:18] [SPEAKER_09]: So for those who don't know, the Mueller-Lyer illusion is the one you probably come across many times.

[00:54:22] [SPEAKER_09]: It's two lines that look like one is longer than the other because for one line there's like caret brackets pointing inward and for the other line, caret brackets pointing outward.

[00:54:31] [SPEAKER_09]: So it just turns out that we're using visual cues, the surrounding visual cues in the line that are giving us a hint about the length of the line.

[00:54:38] [SPEAKER_09]: So there's evidence, like Tamler said, that this is totally dependent on how many of these kinds of lines you encounter in everyday life.

[00:54:46] [SPEAKER_09]: So yeah, that is a clear case.

[00:54:47] [SPEAKER_09]: Like it does get messy.

[00:54:48] [SPEAKER_09]: And like I was struggling as I was reading this paper with trying to understand like how I would apply this articulation principle like across other studies that I might think about.

[00:54:57] [SPEAKER_09]: But let's give that fluid intelligence example that they can.

[00:55:00] [SPEAKER_09]: So the other thing that they're talking about, one of the case studies that they bring up in this paper is Raven's progressive matrices.

[00:55:08] [SPEAKER_09]: So Raven's progressive matrices is a task that's used in IQ testing where you're basically given a series of patterns and you're asked what the next pattern would be.

[00:55:18] [SPEAKER_09]: So these are visual patterns, very basic visual patterns.

[00:55:21] [SPEAKER_09]: And you're supposed to infer what the pattern of change is from one to the next and then give the right answer.

[00:55:28] [SPEAKER_09]: And it's used because it's a kind of test that doesn't rely on verbal intelligence like vocabulary.

[00:55:38] [SPEAKER_09]: It's the kind that people like to say is sort of culturally independent because it's not, you know, you didn't have to be raised knowing a particular set of concepts or being taught things.

[00:55:48] [SPEAKER_09]: And it's taken as a measure of fluid intelligence.

[00:55:51] [SPEAKER_09]: So fluid intelligence is just that subset of what we call intelligence that is characterized by sometimes referred to as just like raw processing power, like of the brain, whereas crystallized intelligence.

[00:56:03] [SPEAKER_01]: What do you mean by that?

[00:56:04] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, so it's better to use the other case to define fluid.

[00:56:08] [SPEAKER_09]: So what people contrast with fluid intelligence is crystallized intelligence.

[00:56:12] [SPEAKER_09]: Crystallized intelligence is something that gets better as we age because it has it's everything to do with knowledge.

[00:56:18] [SPEAKER_09]: So things like vocabulary and verbal ability facts about the world, those things actually get better as we get older.

[00:56:26] [SPEAKER_09]: The more you learn about the world, the more intelligence you have in that just by having the most number of facts.

[00:56:33] [SPEAKER_09]: Exactly. Yeah.

[00:56:34] [SPEAKER_09]: So there are kinds of IQ questions that might be like what's the biggest capital city in Europe or something like that.

[00:56:40] [SPEAKER_09]: Fluid intelligence is things like reaction time, processing power, very basic pattern detection like this that doesn't seem dependent on how much you know.

[00:56:51] [SPEAKER_09]: Right. How much you've learned and that is the kind of intelligence that actually starts dropping off pretty quickly.

[00:56:59] [SPEAKER_09]: Like when you're in your 20s, you just stop being as good at fluid intelligence fairly early on.

[00:57:05] [SPEAKER_09]: There's like a lot of depressing data on this.

[00:57:07] [SPEAKER_09]: By the time you're 20, 21 your reaction time is going down for some of these things.

[00:57:11] [SPEAKER_01]: But like if I understand fluid intelligence, like you're making connections, you're being able to that goes down too?

[00:57:19] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah. So that real time processing of information of like novel information.

[00:57:23] [SPEAKER_09]: That real like I'm giving you.

[00:57:24] [SPEAKER_01]: But is it just a matter of how quickly you can do it or how well you can do it?

[00:57:28] [SPEAKER_09]: It's how well you can do it and how quickly you can do it and how quickly you can do it is often associated with how well you can do it.

[00:57:33] [SPEAKER_09]: But novel like the Raven's progressive matrix, you're seeing patterns that presumably you've never seen before.

[00:57:40] [SPEAKER_09]: And so there's no there's no ability that knowledge is like you haven't memorized anything that will help with this.

[00:57:45] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.

[00:57:46] [SPEAKER_01]: Although even that's probably questionable because you've memorized other kinds of tests like this that you've probably taken as a kid and you're familiar.

[00:57:54] [SPEAKER_01]: You're familiar with tests period.

[00:57:56] [SPEAKER_01]: This is a point that he makes actually.

[00:57:58] [SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[00:57:58] [SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.

[00:58:00] [SPEAKER_09]: So the idea here is that fluid intelligence is seen as this feature of the mind, like to the extent that that intelligence is a thing.

[00:58:08] [SPEAKER_09]: We think that fluid intelligence is an aspect of human intelligence that emerges in all people and importantly, that this is one of the ways in which we should measure it.

[00:58:19] [SPEAKER_09]: And if you measure this in people, it turns out that using Raven's progressive matrices does predict things like how good your grades are going to be, like how much money you're going to make as an adult, like all kinds of stuff that you might think that intelligence should predict.

[00:58:36] [SPEAKER_09]: So you might then conclude like, yeah, this is a thing that smart people universally are able to do and less smart people as they as they quote the paper.

[00:58:46] [SPEAKER_09]: Less clever.

[00:58:47] [SPEAKER_09]: On this less clever people are able to do less.

[00:58:51] [SPEAKER_09]: And we kind of again build our theory of intelligence based on the way we measure it too.

[00:58:56] [SPEAKER_09]: Right. So we come up with these an abstraction about what intelligence is.

[00:58:59] [SPEAKER_09]: We come up with concrete ways to measure it that we think are sort of like true to the to the description that we've given.

[00:59:05] [SPEAKER_09]: And then we then kind of reify the concept of intelligence by calling it your score on Raven's progressive matrices.

[00:59:12] [SPEAKER_01]: Right. That's the weird thing about when the operat- operationalization becomes the actual definition of the construct.

[00:59:24] [SPEAKER_09]: Exactly right.

[00:59:25] [SPEAKER_09]: So one of the things I point out is that this kind of like abstract context, independent pattern matching is something that you're going to get in say highly schooled environments where one of the things that kids do constantly, like every single day is they're moving from domain to domain,

[00:59:47] [SPEAKER_09]: studying different things and being explicitly sort of pointed out like the similarities and differences between these things and that in cultures where you have much less of this, where say you're like not even pre literate, but a culture where there's not a lot of schooling that goes on.

[01:00:05] [SPEAKER_09]: You're you're a farmer or, you know, your your day consists of doing things that aren't really that different from each other.

[01:00:12] [SPEAKER_09]: And there's no need to move from like radically different has to radically different task and develop these sort of meta skills of pattern detection.

[01:00:19] [SPEAKER_09]: Does it really make sense to say that your performance on a Raven's progressive matrix is a measure of intelligence?

[01:00:26] [SPEAKER_09]: Right.

[01:00:26] [SPEAKER_09]: It seems as if the ability that we have to do Raven's progressive matrices pretty clearly seems like an outcropping of the fact that we have environments that we've created where doing this kind of shit is rewarded.

[01:00:39] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like you get better grades and you'll probably make more money because your job will require you to be able to do something like this.

[01:00:46] [SPEAKER_01]: But it wouldn't be helpful.

[01:00:47] [SPEAKER_01]: It wouldn't be beneficial in another kind of environment or at least not to the same degree.

[01:00:51] [SPEAKER_01]: And there's all these other forms of intelligence probably that you don't have that actually would be helpful.

[01:00:58] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but is the whole point just to not say this measures how clever you are or this measures how fluidly intelligent you are?

[01:01:08] [SPEAKER_01]: Is that you know, I think it's deeper than that.

[01:01:10] [SPEAKER_01]: I think so too.

[01:01:10] [SPEAKER_09]: Because I think that this is moving beyond just like the you know,

[01:01:14] [SPEAKER_09]: because there have been a million critiques of intelligence and what it means and where it is where people just say like, oh, you're missing kinetic intelligence or whatever.

[01:01:21] [SPEAKER_09]: And this isn't saying this is a useless test of intelligence.

[01:01:25] [SPEAKER_09]: It's saying once you specify under what conditions environmental conditions, this becomes a really highly advantageous skill to have.

[01:01:33] [SPEAKER_09]: Like once you do that, that's fine to say like this is a some sort of test of ability that is albeit not necessarily universal and might not be universal in your even in your definition of intelligence.

[01:01:45] [SPEAKER_09]: It's still something that's important and clearly is predictive of success in this environment.

[01:01:51] [SPEAKER_09]: Once you specify in this environment, then you're not just saying like this is a dumb whatever like culturally like insensitive test of intelligence.

[01:02:00] [SPEAKER_09]: It's not just that it's like this is an ability.

[01:02:03] [SPEAKER_01]: That will serve you well if you live in this kind of environment with these affordances.

[01:02:11] [SPEAKER_09]: Exactly. And you put in in here like maybe we should talk about Boyden Richardson, but this is like where it's clear, like not even analogy, I guess.

[01:02:17] [SPEAKER_09]: But it's just like really of the same ilk as the gene culture co-evolution stuff where but rather than gene culture, it's cognitive mechanism culture.

[01:02:25] [SPEAKER_09]: You know, one example that I was thinking of and I actually don't know if people talk about this or whether it's even like kosher to talk about it.

[01:02:32] [SPEAKER_09]: But here's an example of maybe like a mix between gene culture, co-evolution and maybe some of this.

[01:02:38] [SPEAKER_09]: I have a theory that autism spectrum traits like people with Asperger's or whatever on the spectrum that we have increasingly created environments where the kinds of abilities that those people have are beneficial.

[01:02:53] [SPEAKER_09]: Right. So like when I was a kid, if you did like computer programming, like I had like a TRS 80 machine where I could have like a little book of basic programs and like I could do it like that ability was it was not important.

[01:03:09] [SPEAKER_01]: Like at that point, you could get your ass kicked.

[01:03:11] [SPEAKER_01]: Like showing too much of that.

[01:03:13] [SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.

[01:03:16] [SPEAKER_09]: We have now created a world in which your ability to do that effectively is so highly valued that the kinds of positive traits that people on the spectrum have probably are outweighing the negative traits like the hit that you might take in sociability or whatever it is.

[01:03:34] [SPEAKER_09]: And so I think this is right from a gene culture, co-evolution perspective.

[01:03:39] [SPEAKER_09]: It might very well be that incidences of spectrum disorders are on the rise because we're there's selective pressures for the things that come along with it in terms of the kind of intelligence.

[01:03:53] [SPEAKER_01]: Although there's not enough generations that this has been true for this.

[01:03:57] [SPEAKER_01]: It's got to be more like it's a dormant property that normally we like we're tuned to suppress.

[01:04:04] [SPEAKER_01]: But then now if it's no longer beneficial to express it, like we have the flexibility to.

[01:04:11] [SPEAKER_09]: Right. So so the one way in which it could happen in a few generations is which I think is happening in Silicon Valley again.

[01:04:17] [SPEAKER_09]: Maybe I'm gonna get in trouble for saying this.

[01:04:19] [SPEAKER_09]: It's clearly true.

[01:04:20] [SPEAKER_09]: You create an environment where you that kind of nerd that we used to get beat up for is actually like super rich and high status.

[01:04:31] [SPEAKER_09]: And they are more likely to attract somebody to marry than they ever would have been before.

[01:04:39] [SPEAKER_09]: And so they have kids and it seems like a pretty straightforward way in a few generations.

[01:04:42] [SPEAKER_09]: You might have more kids on the spectrum because more kids on the spectrum were reproducing.

[01:04:47] [SPEAKER_09]: Right. This is this is a complete like speculation on my end.

[01:04:52] [SPEAKER_01]: David Pizarro, just to be clear, I know people sometimes get confused between us.

[01:04:56] [SPEAKER_01]: That was David Pizarro.

[01:04:58] [SPEAKER_09]: My email is Tamler as a Gmail.

[01:05:03] [SPEAKER_09]: But in the case of cognitive mechanism and articulation again, like it's easy to see that as a certain set of skills and abilities

[01:05:14] [SPEAKER_09]: that rely on certain cognitive mechanisms become more and more important that these are going to be the kind that flourish and that we might start mistaking for universal if we don't bother to like specify the environments in which they're they're emerging.

[01:05:27] [SPEAKER_09]: And I think one of the things that I really liked in this paper was a sort of lamentation that we might be running out of cultures that aren't heavily schooled or pre literate and will lose out on an understanding of the richness of the human mind.

[01:05:41] [SPEAKER_09]: If we don't like catalog those, we don't get to those populations.

[01:05:45] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah. No, that's right.

[01:05:47] [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you know, everything's getting more homogenized.

[01:05:49] [SPEAKER_01]: Everything's getting more the same now, like to an extent.

[01:05:52] [SPEAKER_01]: Right. But yeah, no, that's that's right.

[01:05:55] [SPEAKER_01]: And the same way you don't want to lose like species of animals and have them go extinct.

[01:06:00] [SPEAKER_01]: You never get to study them ever again.

[01:06:03] [SPEAKER_01]: Like we don't want to have like non autists go extinct.

[01:06:10] [SPEAKER_01]: Completely overrun by a spectrum getting bullied by their necks.

[01:06:14] [SPEAKER_01]: They still end up getting bullied like one way or the other, you know, just by their A.I.

[01:06:19] [SPEAKER_01]: necklaces.

[01:06:20] [SPEAKER_09]: Can you imagine though if in like 200 years people are like, what's this empathy the whole time?

[01:06:25] [SPEAKER_09]: You talk about did they just make it up like dragons?

[01:06:28] [SPEAKER_01]: Like they would just go out and like sit by a fire and have some beers and like no glasses or like they would have.

[01:06:36] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, they would have a VR like they would go on hikes by themselves and not like like they wouldn't go hikes in studios.

[01:06:51] [SPEAKER_09]: Oh God.

[01:06:53] [SPEAKER_09]: So they give one more example that I think is kind of interesting.

[01:06:56] [SPEAKER_09]: I don't know if we want to talk about.

[01:06:57] [SPEAKER_09]: And that is attachment and attachment theory where they discuss the method of using this strange situation, which I don't know how much you know about this.

[01:07:05] [SPEAKER_09]: But do you know about the strange situation paradigm?

[01:07:07] [SPEAKER_09]: OK, so this is a method to try to determine how attached your child is, like what kind of attachment it has with its caregiver.

[01:07:15] [SPEAKER_09]: And the way they would do this is they or they still do is they they have like say a mother and a child come in to the lab and they start playing.

[01:07:24] [SPEAKER_09]: They have some toys and they then have a stranger come in like a complete stranger.

[01:07:31] [SPEAKER_09]: And then they have the mother leave.

[01:07:33] [SPEAKER_09]: And what they measure is their reaction of the child to the mother when the mother returns.

[01:07:40] [SPEAKER_09]: And so what you will see is that a pattern seems to emerge that in some cases children get really withdrawn from the mother when she returns.

[01:07:49] [SPEAKER_09]: In some cases, they like are happy.

[01:07:52] [SPEAKER_09]: They like go give her a hug and then they keep playing.

[01:07:54] [SPEAKER_09]: In some cases, they're like super distressed.

[01:07:57] [SPEAKER_09]: And depending on like how they are, they respond, you categorize them as like securely attached or anxiously attached.

[01:08:04] [SPEAKER_09]: Like the theory goes that how you bond with your parent forms a template for all of your subsequent relationships in life.

[01:08:13] [SPEAKER_09]: And that might be true.

[01:08:15] [SPEAKER_09]: Like that might very well be the case that the way that you respond to your mom after she's left you alone in the room with a stranger actually does determine how happy your relationships are when you're an adult.

[01:08:28] [SPEAKER_01]: Or the structure of your relationships, yeah.

[01:08:30] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, yeah.

[01:08:31] [SPEAKER_09]: But as they point out, like surely like this measure can't be treated as a universal when we have cultures in which the way in which children are treated and raised and like communally.

[01:08:42] [SPEAKER_09]: Like this is not a threatening thing.

[01:08:44] [SPEAKER_09]: Like this is not.

[01:08:46] [SPEAKER_09]: And so if the child doesn't give a rat's ass, if the mother leaves and it comes back, in the U.S., we might say like, oh, they're ambivalent about like they have an ambivalent attachment style.

[01:08:57] [SPEAKER_09]: But in another culture you might say like, well, why?

[01:09:00] [SPEAKER_01]: They're secure.

[01:09:00] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, it's of no use for them to get distressed and be mad at their mom because they're not under any kind of.

[01:09:05] [SPEAKER_01]: Or to be even like, oh, I'm so happy to see you.

[01:09:08] [SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.

[01:09:09] [SPEAKER_01]: It's like they're always around and if she's not around my grandma and my aunt and my six cousins are around.

[01:09:15] [SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.

[01:09:16] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.

[01:09:16] [SPEAKER_09]: And so to treat attachment theory in particular, like there's something similar about the Ravens thing and the attachment thing where using the outcome of a measure to then feed into the theory.

[01:09:26] [SPEAKER_09]: Like if it's like so obvious that the responses depend on the environment in which these people have been raised, then it doesn't make any sense to say it's universal.

[01:09:39] [SPEAKER_01]: Now, that's a great example.

[01:09:40] [SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, and like how exactly you deal with that.

[01:09:43] [SPEAKER_01]: And because not every society is either communal or individualized and, you know, how you divide that up and how you specify this is the part that I think needs further development.

[01:09:56] [SPEAKER_01]: Is how you're going to articulate what would be beneficial and what just the environment is, you know, is a really difficult thing to do.

[01:10:07] [SPEAKER_01]: As I think they are, they acknowledge, but you could see a lot of controversy about how somebody decides to specify an environment and what the range of what they're talking about encompasses.

[01:10:20] [SPEAKER_01]: Because if you just do America or the West, that's obviously going to be too broad.

[01:10:26] [SPEAKER_01]: But again, you have that boundary problem.

[01:10:27] [SPEAKER_01]: But if you just say, you know, in the Pizarro household, it is beneficial to, you know, to like shut up when I tell you to shut your ass up or you get a smack and you'll probably have a lot of self control about speaking.

[01:10:47] [SPEAKER_09]: Right.

[01:10:47] [SPEAKER_09]: Right.

[01:10:48] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, I don't know what the right answer is here to you because this does require a lot of work for you to like think about what features of an environment are relevant to the cognitive constructs that you're talking about.

[01:10:59] [SPEAKER_09]: And that's not always obvious because even if I say, OK, I did this study on discussed sensitivity and whatever moral judgment, what feature of the environment should I point out as potentially being relevant?

[01:11:10] [SPEAKER_09]: It's not obvious to me like I can, you know, I could do my best and specify that these are like Cornell students who were raised in middle class environments with toilets with like flush toilets.

[01:11:21] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, like it's not clear what the articulation is without doing some serious theoretical work.

[01:11:27] [SPEAKER_01]: All right. So speaking of attachment anxiety, I have a dog right now that's downstairs that may be experiencing it.

[01:11:34] [SPEAKER_01]: So I want to wrap up, but let me get your final.

[01:11:37] [SPEAKER_01]: Let me ask you this last question because I think we've talked about this issue and this last question is a little irresolvable.

[01:11:43] [SPEAKER_01]: But like I feel like this is a pattern with these kinds of papers, you know, these kind of I don't know if I call them interventions, but in some ways they're kind of interventions.

[01:11:53] [SPEAKER_01]: We're going about this wrong.

[01:11:55] [SPEAKER_01]: Here's and this is a very constructive as we've talked about like version of one of these papers.

[01:12:00] [SPEAKER_01]: Here's what we have to do to do it right.

[01:12:03] [SPEAKER_01]: But that's always a little sketchy, you know, and then like I feel like a lot of times people acknowledge this.

[01:12:09] [SPEAKER_01]: Like I bet people will think this is a really good paper.

[01:12:11] [SPEAKER_01]: It's making really compelling points.

[01:12:13] [SPEAKER_01]: But then when faced with the task of actually doing what they're suggesting, no, they can't for all the problems you just raised like just these simple questions about like how would I go about doing this?

[01:12:23] [SPEAKER_01]: And so it just gets dropped like it just gets that's the pin.

[01:12:27] [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, OK, but that's something we want to put a pin in.

[01:12:29] [SPEAKER_01]: But I don't exactly know how to do it.

[01:12:32] [SPEAKER_01]: And then it just gets dropped and, you know, it'll be brought up every five or ten years by somebody else.

[01:12:39] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.

[01:12:40] [SPEAKER_09]: I mean, it's a big concern of mine, too.

[01:12:41] [SPEAKER_09]: Like I to retain some optimism, I actually think that when if a paper makes a compelling point like this and it offers a solution of some sort, it may be that like point oh three percent of people actually take it seriously enough to try to do it.

[01:12:58] [SPEAKER_09]: I think it's worth doing.

[01:13:05] [SPEAKER_09]: And so I'm of the opinion that like hopefully this causes some people to think a little bit more deeply about things, but the masses were never going to be content with that.

[01:13:16] [SPEAKER_01]: But I mean, you could like like with Disgust just off the top of my head places with like sewage, places with antibiotics, places with like this, in fact, you know, like all those kinds of things would clearly be the right thing to do.

[01:13:28] [SPEAKER_01]: Unless I think people implicitly go with the kind of evolutionary psychologist hypothesis, which is these are things that developed 200000 years ago.

[01:13:38] [SPEAKER_01]: So it really doesn't matter where you live right now.

[01:13:41] [SPEAKER_09]: It's either which is a hand waving that yeah, that I'm prone to doing and but that's an empirical claim.

[01:13:45] [SPEAKER_09]: Like if it doesn't work in some culture like and you know, I've been lucky enough to work with people who have like collaborated with me to study this stuff in other cultures.

[01:13:54] [SPEAKER_09]: But if we don't see it in some cultures, we can't just ignore it.

[01:13:58] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.

[01:13:58] [SPEAKER_09]: So yeah, when I read a paper like this, I'm more concerned with can this make what I do better?

[01:14:03] [SPEAKER_09]: But the journals are going to be disappointing.

[01:14:06] [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.

[01:14:07] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's like you just never hopefully always have opening segments.

[01:14:12] [SPEAKER_01]: We won't run out of those.

[01:14:15] [SPEAKER_01]: All right.

[01:14:17] [SPEAKER_01]: That was fun.

[01:14:18] [SPEAKER_01]: I will keep trying to press more methodological critiques.

[01:14:24] [SPEAKER_01]: You even though I put this in the slack, I think you suggested it.

[01:14:26] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, some of them are good.

[01:14:28] [SPEAKER_01]: All right.

[01:14:28] [SPEAKER_01]: Join us next time on Very Bad Wizard.